A wooden-spoon list is a way of ranking the players in a tournament, based purely on the hierarchy of who beats whom.

Wooden-spoon theory formalises the intuition that it's better to lose to a player who goes on to do well in the tournament than to lose to a player who gets beaten in the next round.

The player who lost to the champion in the semi-finals is third on the wooden-spoon list, the player who lost to the runner-up in the semi-finals is fourth, the player who lost to the champion in the quarter-finals is fifth, and so on.

A rigorous explanation of the theory can be found at my website. Here's the wooden-spoon list for the women's singles at the US Open 2005: